


You Had a Hold (But Nothing To Say)

by ShadowsLament



Category: Grantchester (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-12
Updated: 2017-07-12
Packaged: 2018-12-01 09:32:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11483595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowsLament/pseuds/ShadowsLament
Summary: In which Geordie might be ever so slightly jealous.





	You Had a Hold (But Nothing To Say)

**Author's Note:**

> Blatantly ignores every other relationship on the show.

Sidney had his cuffs rolled up. The folds were sloppy: the left sleeve nudged up awkwardly to his elbow, while the right lolled a bit like Dickens’ tongue, the dog having spent hours inside the vicarage on a scorching midsummer afternoon. The material was damp, but from water or spilled whiskey, Geordie couldn’t yet tell. What he was well aware of, far beyond the point of acceptable distraction, was the undone button at Sidney’s throat. The sunlit skin dipped into his clavicle bared to all and sundry.

“What’s this?” he asked, moving into the room. "No sermons to write? No parishioners in need of your gentle guidance?”

“Gentle?” That snort was proceeded by Sidney’s rueful smile, always lopsided, that one. Favoring one dimple over the other. Unlike Geordie, who was an equal opportunity man when it came to the geometry of his friend’s face. “Perhaps my delivery has lately been off, otherwise I can hardly understand being called a bastard.”

Geordie blinked. “Who? Who said that?”

Sidney waved away the question. “It doesn’t matter.” He topped off the glass he’d seemingly been staring into prior to Geordie’s arrival, grabbed another, and filled that one as well. “Here,” he offered, and though morning had barely broken, Geordie accepted the drink gladly.

“That kind of day already, is it?”

A loose roll of Sidney’s shoulder was answer enough. “What’s happened?”

And the glass was nearly to Geordie’s mouth, too. “I need a reason to turn up?”

“Of course not,” Sidney said, before knocking back what remained of his drink. His throat wasn’t meant to be left untouched, stretched to that angle of grace and sheened with sweat, more tempting than any apple, no matter the garden it was plucked from. “Though if I were asked to recall the last time you stopped by without one, I’d be an hour mute and no closer to providing the desired information.”

Geordie knew it was there: fondness, tucked into the corner of his grin. “So many words when a simple yes would have sufficed.”

“Fine.” Sidney grinned, too, and the man was hardly playing fair. “Yes. Out with it.”

It might have been reluctantly managed, but Geordie pulled his gaze up from Sidney’s mouth, wet from his tongue and the alcohol. “A woman by the name of Linnet Allingham came in this morning, after her neighbor was found in his bed, a gunshot wound at the back of his head.”

“She turned herself in?”

“Quite the opposite,” Geordie said. “She claimed you as her alibi.”

Sidney frowned. “She gave you my name?”

“To the last syllable.”

“And she was supposed to have been here--”

“Oh, no. She wasn’t here. You were with her.” Geordie flipped open the notepad he’d pulled from his pocket. “In bed. According to my notes, your stamina is frankly enviable.” He flashed the page he’d filled over the course of his interview with Linnet, his scrawl tight and untidy, and pointed to a line halfway down. “I didn’t even know that one was possible, physically.” 

“May I?” Sidney asked, setting down his glass to accept the notepad.

Geordie had never been one to stare, but then he’d met Sidney, and he’d watched the expressions that played with the sculpture of his face when he was given a puzzle missing pieces. He’d found himself fascinated by the man’s eyelashes, of all things, unable to look at absolutely anything else. Time passed, they’d spent a great deal of it in each other’s company, and that Sidney was unutterably beautiful had become the only divine truth Geordie never thought to question. 

“This is absurd,” Sidney said after a time, glancing up. “Are you certain someone isn’t trying to pull a prank on you?”

“To the best of my knowledge, anyone in a position to do such a thing would spare a thought for his life first.”

Sidney handed over the notepad. “I’ve never met a Linnet Allingham.”

“Perhaps she gave you a different name. Her hair is the shade of honey, fresh, not as dark as what comes in a--”

“I haven’t forgotten what it feels like to be inside of a woman,” Sidney quietly said, “and I can assure you, I haven’t recently had the pleasure.”

The words were out of his mouth before Geordie thought better of it. “Define recently.”

Something kindled in Sidney’s eyes. Hurt, it looked like. “You know me better than this, Geordie.”

They were on a collision course, with Geordie at the wheel, and for the life of him, he couldn’t seem to stop. “Do I?”

“Yes,” Sidney insisted, in the way of a bullet after it had been fired. “Or have I been flattering myself, thinking that was the case?”

Geordie stepped closer. “This woman, she was adamant.”

Sidney pulled up to his full height. “She can be as adamant as she likes, and all of her claims would still owe nothing to the truth.”

“You read my notes.” Geordie only realized he’d taken another step when Sidney’s scent hit him, warm as anything, and more enticing than any spice or the meadow in springtime. He’d go a far way to have that scent on his clothes, on his own skin. “She described you to the last inch. Said there’s a small birthmark beneath your hipbone, and that your co--”

“Should I undress? So you can see for yourself that at best there’s a freckle where she claimed her mouth had been--”

“Shut up,” Geordie snapped, and though he couldn’t recall reaching for it, Sidney’s shirt was bunched in his fist. “Just...give me a minute.”

Sidney ducked his head to find Geordie’s eyes. That managed, he looked for a long moment, then said, “You didn’t actually believe her.”

Geordie shook his head. He kept hold of Sidney’s shirt, not ready, not yet, to let go. If pushed to it, he’d just have to make a fool of himself and ask Mrs. Maguire to forgive him for the creases. “I believed she’d seen you at some point, that she was attracted to you. Her account read too much like a fantasy to have happened the way she said it did.”

“Oh?” Sidney’s hand covered his, and before Geordie could look up to question what was happening with a glance, their fingers were entwined and pressed to Sidney’s chest. “Don’t believe me capable of sweeping someone off his feet? Or that I could possibly make him forget his name, his surroundings, that he needs air to breathe?”

“His?” Geordie gauged the distance between their mouths to be a few inches, no more. “Him?”

“Did you tell her you knew me?” The touch of Sidney’s hand down Geordie’s back echoed that whisper. “That you and I were...are...close?” 

“It might have come up.” Definitely, it had absolutely come up, and at full volume. Or so he’d been told by Wilkinson once the man had quit his juvenile snickering. “Near the end there.”

“Well, then,” Sidney breathed. “That’s all right.”

That air Sidney mentioned was in low supply. It was the only explanation Geordie had, otherwise he never would have licked his lips to taste what was left of it, wouldn’t have drawn Sidney’s stare there to linger. “Is it?”

“What would a kiss do to us, Geordie?”

He wouldn’t speak for Sidney, but for himself, Geordie thought it might leave him shattered. “I can’t imagine we’d know until it happened.”

“It’s a risk.”

“Most things worth anything are, aren’t they?”

Sidney’s laugh was soft and light as spun sugar. “So many words when _go on_ would have sufficed.”

“For fuck’s sake, Sidney, just--”

The rest of his statement, whatever it was meant to be, was consumed by the kiss. And, Heaven help them both, Sidney knew what he was about, his mouth hot enough to brand, to leave his mark wherever it touched Geordie’s skin. 

Unwilling to let Sidney do all of the claiming, Geordie pressed his fingers into Sidney’s hip, raked them up the length of his back to sink into his hair. Soft, it was, and contrarily cool. Like water or clouds or any number of fanciful things Geordie had never before thought much about. He was happy to let that notion slip in favor of using his grip to change the angle of the kiss, to impossibly deepen it.

Geordie heard a hum drenched in hunger, but wouldn’t swear in court that he knew which of them it came from. 

What might have been minutes or an hour later, Sidney murmured, “Geordie?”

“Mmm?”

“Was it jealousy?”

Geordie looked up from where his thumb traced circles around the pulse at Sidney’s throat. “What are you talking about?”

“The thought of me with Linnet. It bothered you. Why?”

Sighing, Geordie explained, “It was the way she went on about it, speaking as though she knew you inside and out, when I...”

Sidney brushed his lips against Geordie’s temple. “Shall we figure out how and why she killed her neighbor?”

Geordie smiled. “Yes, absolutely,” he said, “but later, I think. Much later.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Kudos and comments are always appreciated!
> 
> I promised myself a couple of things after writing the first line of this fic: 1) I would write it quickly, before I thought better of writing it at all, and 2) I would not edit it, or, if I did, it would be with a very light hand (basically: acting against type and every instinct I possess). That said, I hope you enjoyed it, small moment such as it is.
> 
> Title borrowed from Charlotte OC's "Medicine Man." Nods to a couple of queens of the Golden Age can be found in there, too.


End file.
